IE9 Platform Preview 3 Supports Performance Measurement in Web Pages

Microsoft is working with Google, Mozilla and the W3C to build the WebTiming specification

IE9 Platform Preview

The evolution of the Internet Explorer 9 to Platform Preview 3 is synonymous with the advent of enhancements designed to enable developers to measure performance in web pages. Essentially, Microsoft included support for WebTiming in IE9 Platform Preview 3, although the specification itself is still far from being finalized. However, the Redmond company is currently discussing the development of WebTiming with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but also with rival browser makers Google and Mozilla.

“Enabling developers to accurately measure website performance is important to delivering great HTML5 applications. Today, developers can measure different aspects of performance on their own machines with the Developer Tools; they can’t, however, measure the performance their users actually experience. Today, many sites develop their own libraries that try to measure live performance on web pages. The problem is that these libraries actually slow down the pages for consumers and measure inaccurately, driving the wrong behavior for developers,” noted Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Internet Explorer.

Hachamovitch reveals that in Microsoft’s perspective, the WebTiming specification represents a solution capable of resolving some of the problems that developers come across when measuring web page performance. Microsoft expects to be collaborating with the W3C HTML5 standards body, Google and Mozilla, in order to bring WebTiming from concept to reality, and doing so in an interoperable and standardized way. Obviously, through the introduction of WebTiming, IE9 makes another step further when it comes down to HTML5 support.

“We will work closely with the W3C and its members over the coming months to get this into an official working group and build consensus for a proposed specification while continuing to work together to ensure that the same markup works across browsers,” Hachamovitch stated. “In order to keep making progress in the interim, we’ve included early support for these ideas in the IE9 preview. This is early work for sure, and following convention, IE uses a vendor prefix (-ms) on the namespace because the spec is genuinely under active construction. You can take a closer look at how this works in the WebTiming sample on the test drive site.”